But Delia was indifferent to this tribute. “Why how can you say, when that’s just what I’m trying to find out!” “It doesn’t matter anyway; it will never come off,” Francie went on. “What do you mean by that?” “He’ll give me up in a few weeks. I’ll be sure to do something.” “Do something--?” “Well, that will break the charm,” Francie sighed with the sweetest feeblest fatalism. “If you say that again I shall think you do it on purpose!” Delia declared. “ARE you thinking of George Flack?” she repeated in a moment. “Oh do leave him alone!” Francie answered in one of her rare irritations. “Then why are you so queer?” “Oh I’m tired!”--and the girl turned impatiently away. And this was the simple truth; she was tired of the consideration her sister saw fit to devote to the question of Gaston’s not having, since their return to Paris, brought the old folks, as they used to say at home, to see them. She was overdone with Delia’s theories on this subject, which varied, from the view that he was keeping his intercourse with his American friends unguessed by them because they were uncompromising in their grandeur, to the presumption that that grandeur would descend some day upon the Hotel de l’Univers et de Cheltenham and carry Francie away in a blaze of glory. Sometimes Delia played in her earnest way with the idea that they ought to make certain of Gaston’s omissions the ground of a challenge; at other times she gave her reasons for judging that they ought to take no notice of them. Francie, in this connexion, had neither doctrine nor instinct of her own; and now she was all at once happy and uneasy, all at once in love and in doubt and in fear and in a state of native indifference. Her lover had dwelt to her but little on his domestic circle, and she had noticed this circumstance the more because of a remark dropped by Charles Waterlow to the effect that he and his father were great friends: the word seemed to her odd in that application. She knew he saw that gentleman and the types of high fashion, as she supposed, Mr. Probert’s daughters, very often, and she therefore took for granted that they knew he saw her. But the most he had done was to say they would come and see her like a shot if once they should believe they could trust her. She had wanted to know what he meant by their trusting her, and he had explained that it would seem to them too good to be true--that she should be kind to HIM: something exactly of that sort was what they dreamed of for him. But they had dreamed before and been disappointed and were now on their guard. From the moment they should feel they were on solid ground they would join hands and dance round her. Francie’s answer to this ingenuity was that she didn’t know what he was talking about, and he indulged in no attempt on that occasion to render his meaning more clear; the consequence of which was that he felt he bore as yet with an insufficient mass, he cut, to be plain, a poor figure.